20 December 2016

Aleppo, Tozer

Last night, Lindsey and I watched the "Year in Search" video. I hope Lindsey doesn't mind me sharing this story, but she started to cry around fifteen seconds in. It was an image of the boy in Aleppo. He's sitting in a medical setting, dust all over his body, his face has blood on it. He wipes his face with his hand, then looks at the blood on his hand. He's not crying, he just looks confused.

It touched Lindsey for a few reasons. First, this is something that's happening. People. Children. They're being bombed. Inside, we say, "this isn't right". People shouldn't have to suffer like this. Second, Lindsey found it incredibly wrong that this image was passed by, forgotten, put in an advertisement for Google search...

I think I get it. Google is saying that our lives are closely intertwined with the internet, what we search for are the things that are important to us. These are the search topics we searched for, the happy, the sad, the tragic... This is an image that touched us. That made us weep with Aleppo.

I think I understand Lindsey, too. I understand she hurts for people. She has compassion. She doesn't want to see this child suffer. The Google video made this child a part of an advertisement. It used our sense of compassion to make a product more appealing. If we're feeling emotion while we watch a video, we're more likely to use the product.

I held her for a while, we talked about the situation in Aleppo. We talked about how we love our kids, and no child should have to go through this tragedy.

And just like the video, I'm going to move on. Children are still orphaned, hurt, dying, or dead, and I'm moving on. I feel guilt. Like I have the capability of doing something and I'm not doing it. That image hurts me. What if that was my boy? I'd find a way to Syria and I would hug my boy, I'd tell him he's safe. I'm not doing that, though. I guess I need to think more about what's important in life.

I don't even want to talk about what else I was on my mind. I will anyway.

I'm reading this book The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. I don't know anything about the book, and just what I read on wikipedia about the author. I don't know if people think it's a good book, or a bad one. I guess that's good. I'm trying to form my own opinion. It was a free book, and at the very least, it's getting me to think about my faith.

I just finished chapter 7. Tozer talks about God's voice. Here's a paragraph that made me think:

“When God spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centered men who heard it explained it by natural causes: They said, it thundered. This habit of explaining the voice by appeals to natural law is at the very root of modern science. In the living, breathing cosmos, there is a mysterious something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to understand. The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, “God.” The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.”
To me, it sounds like he's saying science is a self-centered approach to understanding the world. We should accept beauty around us as God's voice and leave it at that. I can't go along with that. I agree, the Universe is mysterious, and full of wonder, but the more we find out about it makes God more real to me. I feel like God's leaving us secrets in the Universe, and every time we find out a new secret, it points to God. The secrets are God's voice. Maybe. Just thinking out loud. There's so much to our Universe, and many unanswered questions...